On May 13, 2004, at 11:33, Its Me wrote:
> How would that compare to what you might accomplish (your best guess if
> needed, assuming you were comparably fluent) in Java/Eclipse?
My Java productivity is roughly comparable, in terms on lines of code.
However, I probably need 4 lines of Java code to do what I can do in
one line of Ruby. That means that Java only becomes more productive for
me if it has existing libraries that I could otherwise write.
Interestingly, there's a growing awareness in the Java communities that
the libraries have gotten out of hand, and that they're now introducing
drag on many projects. EJB 3.0, for example, is going lighter weight.
Containers such as Spring make Java more Ruby-like in terms of the way
you can dynamically knit things together.
The long and the short of it is that for the kind of projects I do,
Ruby makes me productive that Java, but for others that might not be
the case.
> And what are your thoughts on the broader set of potential tools? cm,
> build,
> testing (unit, fit, ui testing), ui, refactoring, even fanciers aspect
> identification/extraction/etc. tools.
I don't know about CM in general: I dislike most of the fancier CM
tools that incorporate workflow. I like SVC and/or subversion: they
don't get in my way. Build is 'make' for me (although in Ruby projects
I use it for creating database schemas, documentation, and general
maintenance, rather than building). Unit Testing is Test::Unit
(although I sometimes wish for something more Ruby-like). I'm not sold
on Fit (even though I wrote the Ruby version of it). I don't do UI
work.
Refactoring is interesting. I do it in Ruby, and the biggest problem is
always renaming stuff. Otherwise, many of the problems you get when
refactoring (say) Java just don't happen in Ruby, so I don't miss not
having support in an IDE.
Cheers
Dave